On 8 November 2022, two years after Joe Biden was elected president of the United States, Americans cast their ballots in a highly consequential midterm election. Although the final results may take days or weeks to be known, the vaunted ‘red wave’ that most politicians, pundits and prognosticators had confidently predicted ended up being merely […]
Joe Biden
In front of many incredulous eyes across the world, the Russian president Vladimir Putin has deployed a full attack on Ukraine. The attack is in line with his long-maturated plan to build a Eurasian sphere of influence. According to his narrative, which takes its roots in the experience and the legends of the Russian empire, […]
Europe’s quest for greater autonomy in the area of defence and security has two closely interlinked but nevertheless distinct dimensions: one is the autonomous capacity to launch and sustain military operations, the other is defence-related technological and industrial sovereignty. Through the second half of the 20th century, the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union […]
The last 40 years have seen a remarkable – and prolonged – global experiment in inequality. While the post-war years of social reform led a new drive towards greater equality, that trend was then set in reverse. Today most rich nations are significantly more unequal than in the 1980s. This reversal has been driven in […]
The coronavirus pandemic has warped all sense of time as we have lurched from Delta to Omicron, and from closings to grand openings, only to swing back again. In the best of times, Americans have an endearing political amnesia that allows us to move past crisis with both a creative verve for future innovations, but […]
While a (rather small) part of the world is approaching the mostly western yearly festive season and people are evaluating the past year, I, too, look back and assess my personal achievements, but also what we have accomplished as a society. Did we grow, or did we fail? Did we make our society more equal, […]